Prioritization of Public Transportation Investments: A Guide for Decision-Makers (2021)

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59   Conclusions 7.1 Key Findings Because the demand for public transportation investments far exceeds the funds available, agencies need proven methods to decide where to allocate limited resources. In this environ- ment of limited funding and tough choices, performance-based investment decision-making empowers agencies to be more accountable, transparent, and rigorous with respect to the multiple objectives of transportation investments—including both traditional traveler benets and broader societal benets and equity outcomes. With that context in mind, this guide presents methods and performance metrics used to prioritize transit capital projects, with a special focus on the comparison of public transit and non-transit projects. It also proposes improvements that advance the state of the practice for prioritizing public transit projects. One key component of this work is the recommended criteria for the prioritization of public transportation investments. Another is the practical demonstration of how the implementation of recommended criteria can aect cross-modal prioritization outcomes. Important conclusions from these recommendations include the following. Context matters. Transit prioritization cannot be one-size-ts-all. Transit prioritization methods should be tailored to individual community and transit market characteristics. Impor- tant contextual factors include community size, level of urbanization, agency resources, funding sources, the historic legacy of investment patterns, and interagency relationships. Successful transit prioritization builds on existing best practices for transportation investment prioritization. is includes carefully dening objectives and measures that incor- porate all factors relevant to project selection, structuring measures to address dierent types of projects, strategically using both qualitative and quantitative metrics based on available tools and data, employing sensitivity testing, and rening practices over time. As with prioritiza- tion generally, the scaling and normalization of measures are important when incorporating measures with dierent units. ere are multiple routes to success in transit prioritization. Choosing an approach to evaluation is not an all-or-nothing decision. In practice, it is helpful to mix dierent forms of evaluation criteria based on available information, such as tools, sta capacity for analysis, and whether a particular objective lends itself to quantication. Options include not only quantita- tive measures but also ordinal scoring and qualitative input. It is better to include an objective than to ignore it due to concerns about insucient quantication methods. Evaluation criteria can capture transit’s many benets for users and society. Eective transit prioritization will address the full range of transit investment benets. Successful transit C H A P T E R 7

60 Prioritization of Public Transportation Investments: A Guide for Decision-Makers prioritization incorporates a wide range of objectives and measures reflecting transit benefits: travel efficiency (travel-time cost savings, congestion reduction, and reliability), affordable access, enhanced economic development, safety, and reducing negative impacts of travel on the environment. Some criteria apply only to public transportation investments, while others can be used to evaluate more than one mode. The selection of criteria depends on the types of projects that need to be compared and differentiated. Productivity and quality of service were repeatedly cited in interviews as contributing to the successful prioritization of transit projects where transit projects compete with one another. In a multimodal environment, criteria related to themes like accessibility, congestion, system preservation, economic impacts, environmental quality, land- use compatibility, quality of life, social equity, and feasibility were identified as most effective for providing transit with a fair and competitive assessment. Certain factors negatively impact the competitiveness of transit projects, but strategies exist for broadening criteria to make them more applicable to public transit. Potential sources of modal bias against transit in investment prioritization include greater difficulty in quantifying or monetizing relevant benefits, mismatch of cost perspectives, inclusion of criteria that do not apply to transit, and insufficiently capturing cross-modal benefits. While the prac- titioner interviews identified several measures that potentially introduce modal bias, they also identified strategies for overcoming each challenge. For example, many prioritization approaches look beyond narrowly defined BCA to incorporate additional non-monetized deci- sion criteria while still maintaining a focus on cost-effectiveness. Similarly, it may be possible to supplement criteria that do not apply to transit with those that do while addressing similar objectives (for example, incorporating an economic development metric to complement a freight-oriented metric). Emphasizing the right measures can help avoid disadvantaging transit in prioritization by capturing transit’s benefits for users and society. An emphasis on measures that capture the full benefits of transit investments, whether quantitatively or qualitatively, can help break the mold of highway-centric prioritization practices while also meaningfully comparing outcomes across modes. Equity scores offer an objective consideration of distributional equity. The importance of considering and evaluating equity was a key theme in the literature and interviews with practitioners. Equity performance measures often compare other aggregate metrics, such as accessibility, safety, travel time, or transportation costs between the general population and the population of interest. Agencies can monitor equity impacts by defining population(s) of interest and assessing differential impacts between groups. The multiple-objective decision analysis approach (MODA) offers a useful structure for transit and cross-modal prioritization. Successful transit investment prioritization relies on fair and accurate accounting of the benefits of transit projects within resource allocation processes. The steps in the MODA framework can serve as a roadmap to strengthening transit prioritization. Testing and refinement over time demonstrate an ongoing commitment to effective transit prioritization. As with all performance-based planning and analysis, there are ongoing opportunities for incremental improvement associated with continued investment in tools, data, and effective community and stakeholder engagement.

Conclusions 61   7.2 Further Research is guidebook identies realistic approaches to transit prioritization that are appropriate to the realities of communities of dierent types. ese approaches hold promise for “leveling the playing eld” when comparing and prioritizing capital investments across multiple modes. ere are also several opportunities for further research that could build on the work presented here. Potential areas for future research or implementation eorts include: Equity- and accessibility-guided investment for post-pandemic recovery and long-term prosperity. e COVID-19 public health crisis, which began during this guide’s development, created many challenges for public transportation agencies, including falling revenues, risks for public transportation workers, and increasing demands for sanitation and social distancing on transit vehicles. For these reasons, leadership, management, and planning sta at public transportation agencies may nd it challenging in the near term to focus on reviewing emerging research and the state of the practice in prioritization or other relevant topics. Nevertheless, there is increasing recognition that equitable post-pandemic recovery and long- term prosperity will require smart and targeted investments, perhaps more than ever before. In particular, the pandemic demonstrated just how critical transit is for people who do not have viable mobility alternatives, many of whom are essential frontline workers who cannot do their jobs remotely. In this context, additional applied research on the use of equity and accessi- bility measures to target transit investments would be particularly important. While this guide- book oers some initial examples of analysis in practice, practitioners may benet from a more thorough review of best practices nationwide, with an emphasis on how the results can be used to guide decision-making. Market segmentation in transit planning and evaluation. COVID-19 has also highlighted that different types of transit riders have had very different responses to changes in service. At the same time, data from bus and rail intelligent transportation systems are providing much greater detail on transit riders and their choices than was historically available from sources such as onboard surveys. There is a need for research into the behavior of different transit customer segments in response to changes in service or price to support improved forecasting and impacts analysis, including variation in impacts across market segments. Cross-modal prioritization in dierent contexts. Government agencies making public transportation investment decisions have dierent policy, regulatory, and funding environments; serve communities with public transit markets of dierent sizes and needs; and possess a variety of data and technical capabilities. Successful practice will look dierent across dierent contexts. While the illustrative archetypes dened in this research take this challenge into account, addi- tional research could go further by applying this research to cross-modal prioritization in agencies representative of each archetype. is type of implementation research could include exploration of specic issues related to tool and data availability, interagency cooperation, stake- holder engagement and oversight, and the interaction between funding and program denition with objective and criteria selection and application. Accounting for uncertainty in prioritization. Transportation outcomes and the eec- tiveness of planned projects depend on outside factors including land-use patterns, the evolution of technology, economic trends, and evolving preferences. Some transportation agencies used scenario planning and other risk-based methods to understand and manage these types of uncertainty. Some are also starting to bring these practices into prioritization.

62 Prioritization of Public Transportation Investments: A Guide for Decision-Makers Additional research could support decision-making by advancing methods for building uncer- tainty into project prioritization, whether through ranking projects under multiple futures to identify those that are most resilient or by addressing the relative certainty or uncertainty of individual decision criteria. Many uncertain drivers of future transportation needs and performance such as land use and modes of technology adoption are particularly important to transit.